Election brings hope this deer season

The classic nine-day gun season started Nov. 17 and it runs through Sunday. More than a half million hunters will be in the woods at one point or another this week.

For a lot of Wisconsinites, including me, this week is something they look forward to all year. It’s a time steeped in tradition. For those who think about it the right way, actually shooting a deer is only one aspect of the ritual and not even the most important part. I’ve always felt that hunters worthy of the name can go through an entire season without shooting, or even seeing, a deer and still count it as a success because they appreciated the privilege of sitting quietly in the woods each day and enjoying time with friends around a woodstove in the evenings.

But for almost two decades now there has been a cloud over the festivities. That cloud has a name: chronic wasting disease. CWD was discovered in Wisconsin after the 2001 season just west of Madison. Since then it has spread to 55 of the state’s 72 counties. It’s only a matter of time before it is everywhere.

And yet, for at least the last eight years, the official policy of our state government has been to do virtually nothing about it. Wisconsin has imposed some restrictions on feeding deer, but the state abandoned aggressive efforts to thin the herd after getting strong objections from hunters while lobbyists representing deer farms have successfully fought off attempts to make them be more responsible. The state has even drastically cut back on promoting the testing for the disease in harvested deer.

While there is no known cure for CWD, other states have had some success in holding back its spread and its prevalence where it exists by doing things like aggressively thinning the herd in areas where CWD has been discovered, outlawing the baiting of deer and requiring deer farms to do a better job of not allowing their captive deer to escape into the wild. I would go further and outlaw deer farms entirely, but that’s probably not a plausible political option right now.

But this season there’s reason for hope. With the election of Tony Evers, we can at least expect that our state will drop its current “see no evil” policy and confront the problem. Whatever we do has to begin with a respect for science and we can’t have scientific knowledge without scientists to find it.

So, the first task of the Evers administration should be to restore scientific positions in the DNR and, just as importantly, return science to a role of prominence within natural resources decision making.

Let me be clear, though. I’m not calling for a dictatorship of PhDs. All natural resource policy needs to be made on a scientific basis but with an overlay of cultural, historical and economic considerations. But policies with no root justification in science — like doing nothing to fight CWD or ignoring climate change altogether — should be rejected out of hand.

It’s not a question of eradicating the disease from Wisconsin because right now there’s no known way to do that. But we can take reasonable and aggressive steps to stem the tide.

For Wisconsin hunters deer season is always a time to look forward to. The Evers election has made this year’s hunt just a little more joyous.